For the purposes of this specification, the present invention will be described in relation to harvesting nuts (e.g., almonds, walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, etc.). However it should be understood that the invention is not so limited, and may be applied and/or used to collect any type of fruit or nuts that may be shaken from trees, blown or swept into windrows and then harvested.
The conventional method for harvesting nuts from trees consists of the following steps: (1) shaking the trees with a shaker machine causing the nuts to fall from the trees; (2) sweeping the nuts with a sweeper and/or blower vehicle to create one or more windrows (a row of nuts between two rows of trees; (3) positioning a harvester machine over and/or near one end of a windrow so that the windrow is completely beneath and in between the wheels of the harvester; and (4) driving the harvester along the length of the windrow so as to collect the nuts by shooting them straight out from behind the harvester and into a nut trailer towed behind the harvester.
Referring to FIG. 1A, therein are shown nuts 103A shaken from rows of trees 106 in a scattered pattern 100A as described in step (1) above. FIG. 1B shows the windrow 100B created between rows of trees 106 after the nuts 103B have been swept with a sweeper or blower vehicle as described in step (2) above. The nuts in the windrow may then be collected as described in steps (3)-(4) using a conventional harvester machine and a trailer towed behind the harvester. However, a problem arises if the harvester and the accompanying nut trailer are not inline, because many nuts will not land in the trailer as the harvester shoots them straight out from behind. This problem commonly arises when a harvester begins to turn inward towards one of the two ends 120 or 121 of the windrow 100B of FIG. 1B.
The problem is illustrated in FIG. 2A. Although the harvester 207 has already begun picking up nuts 203 from the end 221A of windrow 200A, the trailer 208 has not yet completed the turn to windrow 200A. As a result, rather than landing in the trailer 208, the nuts 203 gathered by the harvester 207 undesirably scatter on the ground behind the harvester (see, e.g., scattered nuts 209). A similar “outward” problem occurs at the other end 220A of the windrow 200A since the harvester 207 needs to turn out of the windrow 200A towards an adjacent windrow prior to collecting all of the nuts 203. To gather all of the nuts 203 at end 220A of windrow 200A, the harvester 207 would undesirably have to back up to pick up the nuts 203.
Referring now to FIG. 2B, it is shown therein that because of the configuration of a typical orchard having rows of trees 206, and the configuration of the harvester 207 and trailer 208, the harvester 207 and trailer 208 will not be inline until the harvester 207 and trailer 208 have traveled into the windrow 200B a distance D equal to their combined length. Accordingly, before the harvester 207 and trailer 208 begin to collect nuts 203, the ends 220A, 221A of FIG. 2A of the windrow 200A are typically brought inward the distance D so as to form a shortened windrow 200B with repositioned ends 220B, 221B as shown in FIG. 2B. As a result, so long as the ends 220A, 221A are brought in at least by the combined length D of the harvester 207 and trailer 208, the harvester 207 will remain aligned with the trailer 208 throughout the process of collecting the nuts in shortened windrow 200B.
Currently, moving the ends of a windrow inward undesirably involves the manual use of hand blowers and/or hand rakes. Workers either walk in from the ends of a windrow carrying a hand blower and blow the nuts towards the middle of the windrow, or manually rake the nuts towards the center of the windrow, which is a slow process involving significant labor costs. Moving the nuts with a hand blower also makes precise placement of the nuts difficult. Without careful control some nuts may be missed by the harvester, affecting yields. Hand raking of the nuts is even more time-consuming and labor intensive than hand blowing the nuts from the windrow ends inward.
The nuts at the ends of the windows that are brought in conventionally, by either a hand blower or raking, are typically brought in as short of a distance as possible, in order to minimize the labor involved in shortening the windrow. As a result, typically, there is a heavy concentration of nuts at or near the ends of the shortened length of the windrow. The heavy concentration of nuts may not all be picked up by the harvester machine in one pass, and the machine may have to back up and drive over the ends of the shortened windrows again, in order to ensure that all nuts are collected. The additional time to back up and drive over the ends of the windrows shortened by a conventional method of moving the ends of the windrows inward adds significant cost to the process of harvesting the nuts.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an apparatus and methodology which overcomes these limitations. To this end, it should be noted that the above-described deficiencies are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of conventional systems, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with the current state of the art and corresponding benefits of some of the various non-limiting embodiments may become further apparent upon review of the following description of the invention.